Part time job, full time service
- Hueiyen Lanpao Editorial :: May 06, 2013 -
As the name suggest, part-time lecturers are just stop-gap arrangement for a period while the regular teachers are absent from duty or have not yet been appointed, and they have to be let go after their service period is over with termination of the agreement or contract signed between the parties concerned.
So, looking from this angle, the 'on' and 'off' agitation of the part-time lecturers working in various Government colleges in Manipur demanding regularization of their service or hike in their remuneration may sound illogical to people in other parts of the country.
However, the issue is not that simple and the problem of underpaid part-time lecturers in Manipur has persisted for the last 14-15 years with no solution in sight. Compounding the matter, every successive Governments and Education Ministers have been giving assurances after assurances on redressing the grievances of the part-time lecturers including their demand for enhancing remuneration and regularization of services in phase-manner, but these assurances have been never materialized.
If DD Thaisii, when he was the Education Minister, had made the tall promise of enhancing the monthly salary of the part-time lecturers to Rs 21,000 as per the guidelines of UGC, the present Education Minister Moirangthem Okendro Singh has not been lagging behind in trying to placate the part-time lecturers with assurances of better service condition.
To understand the issue of part-time lecturers in Manipur, one should understand the fact that they have been appointed by the Government to address the problem of shortage of lecturers in all its colleges at a time when the State was experiencing acute financial problem and its lone recruitment body, Manipur Public Service Commission (MPSC) was not able to function properly.
Under a policy of the State Government, as many as 637 part-time lecturers were appointed during the period from 1991 to 1999 and at present there are 430 part-time lecturers serving in all the 28 colleges under the Government of Manipur.
Interestingly, out of the 430 part-time lecturers, 355 of them have been categorized as those who have fulfilled the latest UGC prescribed RRs and they are given a monthly salary of Rs 8000, which is, in fact, the basic minimum pay scale of regular lecturers during pre-revised period, while the remaining 75 part-time lecturers are categorized as those who have not attained the latest UGC prescribed RRs and they are given only Rs 4500 per month as salary, regardless of rising prices of essential commodities.
In addition to this categorization, which, of course, was not at all a part of the policy under which their appointments had been finalized more than a decade ago, part-time lecturers, whose service tenures have been kept on extending so far, are being entrusted with the same kind of workload, if not more, like the regular lecturers who enjoy more amount of salary for the same workload.
This is definitely unfair. If students are the future pillars of the Nation, then teachers are the builders of these future pillars.
So, why is this discrimination of making some teachers to wallow in poverty while the rest prosper? The State Government and more particularly the Education Minister should give an answer to this question.
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